PHILADELPHIA–Let me make a prediction: There will be some monkeyshines Tuesday night during the roll call of the states that will culminate in the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton for President of the United States. Some of the Irreconcilables will make fuss and noise. There will be chanting and yelling, all of it organized and all of it on television, which makes anything more unfortunate than it has to be. And, if Monday's coverage of the various public tantrums is any indication, these episodes will be swiftly woven into a narrative, which, a) will give the good folks at home a completely incorrect view of what's actually going on; and b) will be used once again as part of the ongoing Both Siderist alibi for the fiesta of vitriol that we saw last week. I know all this will happen as well as I know that the Wanamaker Building is threatening to melt this week.

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On Monday, there was some booing and some heckling, and there was the usual picketing and protesting outside the Wells Fargo Center. Most of it was distasteful. (Dear Idiots: Elijah Cummings has been fighting on the most insane of all House committees–the one once chaired by Darrell Issa and now chaired by lop-headed Javert, Trey Gowdy–for going on six years now.) However, the general tone of the coverage made it all sound like something halfway between a harvest-time hooley and the closing scenes of Les Miserables.

The general tone of the coverage made it all sound like something halfway between a harvest-time hooley and the closing scenes of Les Miserables.

And can we please call a truce on the use of the word "chaos" to describe anything short of a Papal High Mass? There was not "chaos" in Cleveland when the Rules report was thrown out to the floor. There was not "chaos" here on Monday, either inside or outside the hall. I've seen chaos. There was chaos in Overtown, Miami during the week of the Super Bowl in 1989. There was chaos at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. What we've seen here and in Cleveland was simply loud and tasteless politics of the kind that was the rule rather than the exception, not only for the first 150 years of this country's existence, but also for the period extending from 1965 to 1976. There is only one major difference. In Philadelphia, the loud and tasteless politics came from a bunch of people locked away from the venue on Broad Street and from some obstreperous yahoos sitting in the cheap seats in the hall. In Cleveland, the loud and tasteless politics came from the damn podium–including from the nominee himself. That seems to me to be a rather compelling difference.

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However, as much as I'd like it, not everybody is me. Somehow, a woman with duct tape on her mouth is equivalent to the fact that the Republican Party has a crazy person running around the landscape with the party's nomination in his mouth. Ron Fournier, who once occupied his time sending Karl Rove pep talks while Rove and the administration were lying about the death of Pat Tillman, went on a Twitter spree centered on the refrain that, "all hell broke loose." Perhaps Ron has a more limited notion of perdition's geography than I do, but, in my view, a very small part of hell broke out at all. A ward of hell, perhaps. Or a precinct. And if I ever find the person who taught Fournier the words "disruption" or "duopoly," I am going to remove that person's spleen with a melon baller. And, in New Yorkmagazine, Jonathan Chait voiced similar concerns:

In place of a strategy was diffuse rage. Protesters, minimal in Cleveland, thronged through the streets of Philadelphia. Inside the convention hall, Bernie Sanders loyalists booed everything—mentions of Hillary Clinton, moderates, liberals, left-wingers, even the opening prayer. Some of them repeated the "Lock her up!" chant heard in Cleveland. It seemed possible that the entire convention would be a chaotic cascade of jeering and hostile chants.

All due respect, but this is all my bollocks. This stopped "seeming possible" by about 6 o'clock Monday night. Some folks got caught flatfooted by the hooting in the first couple of hours of the convention, but, by the time the big bats came out, any heckling was pretty much drowned out by general applause. I only knew about the "Goldman Sachs" chants directed at Senator Professor Warren because I was standing 30 feet away from the people doing the chanting. And I can say quite confidently that, if there had been any kind of "chaotic cascade of jeering" aimed at Michelle Obama from the floor, you would not be able to identify the hecklers with dental records. Everything except the national press corps pretty much settled down. However, Chait moved from that observation into unaccountable general panic:

Ridiculous or not, they dominated the entire day. It was a testament to the power of a fanatical, disruptive minority. In a sense, his entire campaign has been evidence of this same thing. And if the Bernie movement had convinced the mainstream of the Democratic Party of anything, it was how horrifying the world would look if that vanguard ever gained real power.

Dude, El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago and his people were far more aggressive, both on the floor and from the stage, and he won the nomination. You're horrified at the possibility of a bunch of frustrated young people gaining real power?

I know, I know. Nate Silver put out a poll that scared everybody, and the elite political press will continue to take seriously He, Trump's burlesque concern for the (white) working class, the very people he's been screwing in his day job his entire life. The primary burlesque at work here is that much of the elite political press is terrified to admit white nationalism always had a substantial constituency in American politics, and that those good heartland folks who are predisposed to it will use hating someone else as balm and sustenance whenever the economy goes sour. (This, it should be said, was one of the themes of SPW's speech Monday night.) It's easier to talk about how Joe Six-Pack is baffled by the faceless power of the global economy than it is to admit that Joe is also hardwired to be a racist and a xenophobe, and that there's always a cheap crook running for office who will assume powering up that hard wire will light up the glory road.

Needless to say, there always has been a constituency for bullies and phony tough guys as well. That may be enough to push He, Trump over the finish line, but it does nobody any good to pretend that a bunch of people hollering from the loge is the same thing as the candidate himself shouting poison from the stage. The latter is something that can really sell. If you don't understand that by now, I'm not sure you ever will.